More than one year ago I published a paper about design patterns for many-to-many dimension relationships . Since then, I built other models and I got more experience about possible performance optimizations. Unfortunately, I still hadn't time to write  Read more

Usually I write in this blog about Business Intelligence without too much consideration for "traditional" access to SQL Server. However, in a parallel universe I also wrote a book about LINQ and now that we are in full Christmas mode, I hope you may be  Read more

Brian Welcker (who is leaving SSRS team - good luck Brian!) has announced a long explanation of the Report Builder 2008 positioning . For me (and all of you who live in the multidimensional business...) the most important part of the post is this simple  Read more

I just read the SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment performance study published by VMware (thanks to virtualization.info for the link ). Often I've been asked if it is a good move having a SQL Server in production in a virtual  Read more

Today I discovered that DefaultMember might result in a member other thant the default dimension member. Reading documentation , I got the idea that DefaultMember would be always the default member defined for a dimension into a cube. In reality, the  Read more

My backlog makes me late on a lot of announcements, but I'd like to post a link to the new MDX Studio by Mosha Pasumansky , because this is a very useful tool when you need to dig into an MDX query issue. There is a forum dedicated to the tool on SSAS  Read more

Darren Gosbell describes a useful technique to clear cache and execute an MDX statement using a single MDX command window. It's very very useful when you're doing performance tuning of your MDX script!  Read more

Microsoft released a short whitepaper about how scaling-out queries to a SSAS database leveraging on SAN snapshot features . It's an interesting read if you have a SSAS database with many users and don't have the time to copy a database on several servers  Read more

I fixed an issue of the DateTool dimension I presented in a previous post . The DateTool was unusable on OWC 11, which is the component used by BI Dev Studio and SQL Server Management Studio to browse a cube. I only added two statements in MDX Script  Read more

Alberto posted one of the patterns we use designing a dimensional model (this one is about the discretization of a measure into a dimension). We'd like to get some feedback about this solution: is there someone who used similar patterns? We consider this  Read more